Mobile computing devices with touch-sensitive displays such as smart phones and tablet computing devices are two of the fastest growing categories of computing devices. These devices threaten to displace notebook and desktop computers as the preferred platform for many tasks that users engage in every day. Developers of these mobile devices have eschewed mouse and touchpad pointing devices in favor of on-screen graphical user interfaces and methods that have the user select content and edit content on touch-sensitive displays using direct manipulation of objects on the screen. Ording, et. al. describe one example of this current approach in U.S. Pat. No. 8,255,830 B2. However, the performance and usability of these current solutions is generally inferior to the mouse and/or touchpad based solutions commonly employed with conventional notebook and desktop devices. Whereas these current solutions support a simple task such as quick selection of a single word or an entire content, they do not support quick selection of a character, group of characters, or group of words. In addition, they do not support equally well tasks performed at any location on the display ranging from tasks near the center of the display to those near the edge of the display. These existing solutions also do not support user setting of key control parameters to meet user preferences and user needs. Finally, these existing solutions do not support user accessibility settings to enable the broadest set of users to access applications on these powerful devices.
We have developed a method and graphical user interface for positioning the cursor and selecting text on computing devices with touch-sensitive displays that overcomes the deficiencies of existing solutions.